Success! Getting Dressed Independently

After five years of teaching Samuel how to get dressed, we have reached a big milestone in the last few weeks: Samuel is independently dressing himself!

We have traveled a long road on the journey to teaching Samuel to dress himself. He was four years olds when I started teaching him. At that time we were still doing everything for him. I started by assisting him in the process hand-over-hand. Progress was very slow, but I also took things slowly. After all, during that time I also had a baby to deal with and then three years later, another baby. We also had the pressure of having to be out of the house at a certain time each morning to get Samuel to school, so in the process I often took shortcuts so that we wouldn't be running too late. Saturdays were the time to take a little longer.

Slowly, Samuel learned to put on his shirt and pants. Initially I would hand him the clothing in the correct position and tell him "the tag goes in the back." Putting on socks was a more difficult hurdle, but he eventually got the hang of that. Then we worked on making sure the tag was in the right place. Somewhere in this process I started leaving him on his own to do everything (but never on school days). It could take him upwards of a half hour to an hour to develop the initiative to do the job, but he eventually would. I wish I had kept a record of dates that he achieved each milestone, but I did not.

While Samuel was in school I never was able to rely on him dressing himself on weekdays. I'm sure he NEVER would have done the work all day and would have been perfectly happy staying home! Sunday was another day I couldn't have him dress himself because of needing to get to church. That only left one real day, Saturday, that I could leave him to his own devices.

The situation has been much different this year. Since we no longer need to get out the door most mornings, we have much more flexibility in our daily schedule. As the school year started this past fall, we were still pretty new to having in-home help in the morning. Initially we had a helper arrive at 8am. I let her guide Samuel along in getting dressed. I still felt somewhat pressured to have him complete the process in a certain period of time. A few weeks later the in-home help started to arrive at 10am. Most mornings Samuel slept in until then (along with my other kids. They get to bed late at night and mornings are my time to alone to get things done) and was then guided along to get dressed. Samuel made progress but still wasn't very motivated to get the job done.

Now, my oldest son is setting his alarm clock to get up in the morning. He discovered he likes the quiet time also. He has a few minutes to play Playstation before he starts his school work. Some mornings Samuel would wake up as well. He wanted to watch videos. It finally occurred to me that I now had the perfect reinforcer for Samuel. Just in the past two weeks I have started requiring Samuel to get dressed before coming downstairs to watch a video. This past week I added the requirement of going over our daily calendar and singing with me. I wake him up between 8:30 and 9:00 to get started.

It has really surprised me how well he is accepting this! One morning I was busy downstairs. I could hear activity upstairs and when I finally got around to going up, Samuel was walking down the stairs completely dressed! He stopped however, and said, "Uh-oh, I forgot to clean my room!" (he had already made his bed!) He turned back and took care of it! After almost three years of seeing the same visual schedule, Samuel has the routine down and the motivation to do it on his own! Yipppeeee! Now I can put a little more attention on my two year old who is already trying to dress and undress herself! A next step with Samuel (once we revel in this victory for a little while) will be to work on him using zippers and buttons. Most of his clothes do not have these things right now but I eventually want him to be able to wear clothes with these.